When Claudio Miranda, ASC was deciding how to shoot several pivotal scenes in Tron Legacy, he determined that due to the weight of the dual Sony F35 3D camera package and the multilevel sets, traditional Steadicam shots would be impossible. He wanted a rig with the flexibility of a Steadicam, the ability to go anywhere and provide rock solid movement for the heavy camera package.

Claudio had worked with Pacific Motion Control before and was familiar with many of our rigs, so he called to see if we could make these shots happen. As we talked with Claudio, we determined that what was needed for the job was a portable, overhead motion control crane system – a system that didn’t exist. This was a challenge that we were determined to meet. Over the next few weeks, we custom built the Overhead Graphlite system to meet the needs of the production. This rig is totally portable. In fact, it’s first job (Tron) was over 1,200 miles away from our shop. The rig provided 48′ of linear movement (adaptable from 12′-72′), 15 feet of arm reach, 360+ degrees (infinite) of swing, 45 degrees of boom travel, 360+ degrees of pan and tilt. It did all of this while carrying a camera package that weighed 90 pounds!

With little time to complete the build and test the rig before shooting, Tron Legacy would be a trial by fire, but the rig performed flawlessly. During the weeks of filming the rig never missed a beat, and enabled the crew to capture amazing shots, including a fight scene shot in a continuous circle, with over 1080 degrees of movement!

This Pioneer Corn commercial used motion control to seamlessly marry live-action and CGI.

Computer Animation is used to show the high-tech side of pioneer corn. These effects are married to a single live-action shot, featuring a slow sweeping camera move. Motion Control move data was provided to the post house to and imported in to MAYA to model the camera move in the virtual realm.

Kuper motion control software is able to export motion control data as an ASCII data file, which can easily be imported into MAYA and other 3D modeling and CG programs.

This commercial is a great example of how motion control photography can be used to seamlessly add CGI elements to live-action while incorporating precision camera movement.

On the set of a recent Tsubaki commercial, I had the opportunity to capture a few hundred pictures of the Gazelle Motion Control Camera Crane in action, in order to put together a couple of really good 3D photo sets on Microsoft’s Photosynth website. For someone unfamiliar with motion control equipment, this is a good opportunity to see what a motion control camera crane looks like, set up and ready to go.

For this shot, we were on a very long track run, and the rig needed to go about 13 feet per second, so we were using our large servo track motor, and a 5/1 gear ratio for the track drive. we also needed to pan very quickly, so we fitted our motion control pan/tilt head with a servo motor for pan, and a large servo amplifier rode on the rig.

At the time of this shoot, this was as fast as we could possibly make the Gazelle go, and it performed flawlessly. Since this time, we built a much faster track drive system. Originally built for the Cheetah dolly, this track drive system can be used on all of our rigs, giving them the fastest tracking speeds of any full motion control systems.